clay county histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director  HCSCC

It’s 9pm, I’m sitting at home watching a German soccer game, listening to music, thinking of history, and feeling absolutely spoiled.

I was at the Tower of London twenty years ago. As I looked around the bedroom of King Edward I (the bad guy from Braveheart), I thought to myself “this place is a dump!” I’ve lived in a lot of crummy, condemnable dives in Fargo-Moorhead, but I’ve always lived better than a medieval king. My 1920s story-and-a-half bungalow is quaint by today’s standards, but I have indoor plumbing. Old King Ed’s bathroom was a hole in the cold stone wall that funneled stuff down the exterior wall and onto his lawn. Many days, out of the blue, I say out loud to myself “I’m thankful for indoor plumbing.”

I’m also thankful for my furnace. In an old interview I read, Oakport farmer Ray Gesell said that on cold nights in the 1920-30s, he’d wake up with frost covering his blanket and the bucket of water next to his bed would be frozen solid. When my wife was little in the 1980s, her house at Oakport was still heated with a wood stove. Her dad, Wes Sorenson, spent a lot of his weekends turning trees into firewood.  

During the height of Covid lockdown, looking for something to watch on TV, I got hooked on German soccer. For an $8 a month subscription, one of those smart TV aps lets me watch every German Bundesliga soccer game whenever I want. Dr. N. G. Rao didn’t find it so easy to watch cricket from back home in India. N. G. Rao came to NDSU in 1962 to earn his doctorate but stayed for the following 30 years to teach and be the state toxicologist of North Dakota. In order to watch important cricket games, Dr. Rao figured out how to patch into satellites to beam the games from India to a room full of cricket fans at NDSU. These watch parties were important events for international students and faculty back then.

I pay a $10 a month subscription so I can listen to pretty much every song ever recorded whenever I want on my telephone. Kids today are lucky to have every song at their fingertips, but I wouldn’t trade my teenage music nerd years for theirs. I loved the thrill of the hunt – going to Vinyl Connection or Mother’s with $20 in my pocket, finding something intriguing in the stacks, and rushing home to see if it was any good. We 20th century teenagers (depending upon our vintage) wore out our CDs, cassettes, 8-Tracks, vinyl records, and phonograph wax cylinders by listening to them over and over again. Their scarcity made us cherish them and ensured heavy rotation.   

 Though we live better than kings, we can’t help but be bored with our embarrassment of riches. To quote Bruce Springsteen (who plays concerts for me through my headphones at my whim) “57 channels and nothing’s on.”  Oh, let’s cue that song up next.